History of the FIFA World Cup The inaugural FIFA World Cup was held in 1930 and was hosted by Uruguay. Every four summers since then, the event captures the attention of audiences worldwide as nations compete in this global competition. Ideas about having the world’s strongest football teams come together and compete was first thought of in the 1920s by a group of French football administrators led by Jules Rimet. Three World Cup tournaments had been completed when the event was halted due to the Second World War. After a twelve years hiatus, the World Cup resumed and has been a fixture ever since. This coming summer in Brazil will be the 20th World Cup in the history of the event. Through the twenty tournaments, there have only been eight different countries that have been able to lift the glistening golden trophy named after Jules Rimet (FIFA History 2014). The most recent nation to win the tournament was Spain who defeated the Netherlands in the summer 2010 when the event was hosted by South Africa. Format Not every nation gets the chance to compete in the FIFA World Cup. In order to even be eligible to compete in the tournament there is an extensive qualifying schedule that is required of each nation. The world is split up by FIFA into six regions: Africa, Asia, Europe (UEFA), North, Central American and the Caribbean (CONCACAF), Oceania, and South America (CONMEBOL). FIFA allocates the amount of teams that makes it from each of these six regions and a total of 32 teams earn a spot for the right to compete for the World Cup (Robinson 2014). Teams are then randomly drawn into eight groups of four. The first round is round robin so each nation is guaranteed three matches. After the round robin, the top two teams from each group advance to the knockout stage. During the knockout stage teams play single elimination in a bracket style format. Each round the number of teams reduces by half until the champion is crowned.
Bidding Process Many nations try to be the one to host one of the future FIFA World Cups because of all the positive things that come from it. To begin with, it becomes very prestigious for the current government to win a bid to host the FIFA World Cup. Most likely, these political leaders will be remembered throughout the history of their country. On top of this other incentives the FIFA World Cup will bring would be economic gain through tourism, broadcasting and logistics. To be considered in the bidding process a nation must show interest in hosting nine years in advance. Official registration and formation of bid committees must also be set by the end of that year. In the bid is seemed worthy enough then the summer eight years before wanting to host the event, a FIFA delegation will be sent to investigate the existing facilities and the plans to show what other facilities are planned on being built. After this process, the bidding nations are voted on by the FIFA Executive Committee which is comprised of 24 members. There are multiple rounds of voting which cuts down the number of possible nations each time the vote is taken. Simple majority is all a nation needs in order to win the bid to host the FIFA World Cup (Macdonald 2010). Qatar will be the first Arab nation and location in the Middle East to host the FIFA World Cup. Qatar beat out the United States, South Korea, Japan and Australia for the right to host this global event. During the bidding process Qatar officials pushed the fact that there were hundreds of millions of sport fans “brimming” with passion for the sport. Having television and other technological issues would not be a problem in this region because of how advanced the nation of Qatar already is. Reducing the impact the tournament had on the environment and having game plans that would save fans travel time and money were two of the bigger points that the Qatar officials presented
